Adam Green & Binki Shapiro

Rounder; 2013

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If you didn't know otherwise, you'd swear that Moldy PeachAdam Green and Little Joy vocalist (and sometime Beck collaborator) Binki Shapiro's self-titled album of duets was a collection of covers. After touring together and exchanging a stream of texts, they released last year's Fall, a pleasant little below-the-radar, three-song EP. Things clicked, and Green and Shapiro wisely decided to develop the fortuitous outing into this full-fledged debut album. Their respective backgrounds-- the salt-stung breeze of Little Joy, the Peaches' bizarro anti-folk, Green's solo singer-songwriter rock pastiche-- make Adam Green & Binki Shapiro a likely invocation of the legacies left by Lee and Nancy, Richard and Linda, Gram and Emmylou. It's safe to say that the sweet, simple luxuries of romantic 1960s pop will forever more be mined in some capacity, making the line between flattery and forgery a very fine one.

Usually these kind of cheerful, laidback one-offs never amount to much more than just that, not heeding the possibility of becoming either baldly derivative or enamel-strippingly saccharine (or both). Green and Shapiro clearly understand that the broad appeal of love songs set in an almost universally beloved style doesn't work unless the songs themselves are clever, genuine, and a little tongue-in-cheek. And Adam Green & Binki Shapiro is all of that, with two people playing to their strengths to make music that's intimate and dexterous in its ability to quietly coax out relatable emotions. They shared their ideas as guitar ditties, but Green and Shapiro headed in a slightly more ambitious direction in the studio, taking the time to give these songs their proper due with crisp production and subtle but inventive arrangements, elevating what could have been just another ho-hum collection of hummers and strummers.

In fact, most of the songs on the record are good enough to make it seem as if their day jobs are being spun off from the cozy little nucleus they've created here, rather than the other way around. This kind of connection suggests more than just a creative collaboration, and despite the fact that the two apparently don't share a romantic tie, it's largely beside the point. Instead, Green and Shapiro come off as two kindred spirits with similar relationship experiences, like two people just meeting whose old stories miraculously become new again. Inversely, they also seem like two people who've known each other for ages, who share their morning coffee and newspaper while listening to albums like this one. As Shapiro mentioned in an interview, "It's kind of like reading your diary out loud to somebody." It's lucky that she gave Green the key to it.

These aren't songs meant to jump out at you, but spend some time with them and little illuminations flicker to life. Songs like "Casanova" find Shapiro trying to reconcile the past of a current lover ("Forgive my ugliness should I find out/ Something that I don't wan't to know about"), playing a "Casanova to the mentally ill," which is wryly funny if you're casually familiar with even a tenth of Green's music. Later, she finds herself pining for the attention of an older man on "If You Want Me To", sweetly and strangely heading-off all the implied ickiness that comes with the emotional and sexual inexperience of such an endeavor. Best of all are the closing two tracks, the darkly pretty "The Nighttime Stopped Bleeding", and the album's best song, "Don't Ask for More", which tenderly invokes Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.

Yet as good as Green and Shapiro are as foils-- between her vocals once described here as being "like summer wine" and his urban cowboy baritone-- it's really Shapiro's show: All the aforementioned songs feature only Shapiro's voice, save for "Nighttime". And it makes sense: Underutilized in Little Joy, she has the rare ability to hold your attention without doing much at all; she sounds precious, but not in the pejorative sense. Adam Green & Binki Shapiro is short and to the point, with the anticipation of another go around sometime in the near future enough to keep them in your thoughts. And before you know it, you're finding yourself wishing they'd just knock off the goddamn charade and kiss already.